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Just a quick reminder that The Painted Sheep will have a booth full of fibery goodness at tomorrow’s Nutmeg Spinner’s Guild meeting. The meeting goes from about 9-3 and is held at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, CT. There will be a felting workshop at the meeting – full details available on the Nutmeg Spinners’ website. We will have all of our yarns and rovings available at tomorrow’s meeting. Perfect for your holiday gift giving!
Hope to see you there!
I’m giddy! I feel like a little kid, ’cause I just got the best present from my Dad! Look what he made me: 
A skein winder!!! Its wonderful! He made it in cherry, so its gorgeous too. Its fully adjustable, making about 58″ skeins at its widest. It even has a counter on the back. I’m in heaven!
My father has just solved one of my biggest frustrations with dyeing yarn – not having a really functional skein winder. All of my base yarns come in either large hanks or cones and need to be wound off into smaller hanks before dyeing. I reskein for the color effect and practicality after dyeing. After trying several different things, we settled on Everett doing the initial winding onto a 2 yard niddy noddy and then reskeining from one swift to another. Both were slow and torture on the back – which was preventing me from helping. I’ve been looking at skeiner winders for months but kept feeling like I couldn’t bring myself to buy one. I talked to Dad a couple of weeks ago about making one and this is what he came up with. He is seriously talented (if you’ve been to our house, you’ve seen our butcher block table. He made that – it was our wedding gift. Amazing talent for wood working). This skein winder is perfect – I reskeined 3 skeins of The Painted Sock in a few minutes last night. It works great. Thank you, thank you, thank you Dad!!!
Here’s another picture, that’s The Painted Sock in Rainbow that I’m reskeining from my wood swift:
This skein winder is also the prototype for one that I’m going to sell. It’ll be a special order item, made by my father. I’ll take better pictures and get it up on the website this weekend! If you are interested in the meantime, email me kris@thepaintedsheep.com
I love my blogs – I’ve lost track of how many I read, but I’d guess around 75. I just added several of them to my blogroll here. There’s so much interesting stuff on the blogs, especially the knit blogs. I get new techniques and ideas all the time. That and they’re just plain fun to read.
How do I read all of these blogs? I found two great tools. One is the Friends’ Blogs tab on Ravelry – it lists all of your friends’ recent blog posts. The other – Bloglines! Another great, free online resource I discovered recently. It allows you to subscribe to the feed for a blog, then it lets you know when there’s a new post – all on one page. Its great – no more clicking on blog after blog to see if there’s an update. I added a button on the left for you to get to Bloglines and subscribe to The Painted Sheep blog’s feed.
Another new look – this one I really like. I’ve been playing with my logo and name images a bit in order to create a couple of upcoming ads on Ravelry (look for them in December) and to improve the look of my avatars and headers on the blog, Ravelry and Etsy. No changes to the logo, really – I’ve just finally found time to play with my image editing software and refine things so that they look crisper on the screen. I figured an update to the blog them was in order too. I think it matches the logo better – this look should be here to stay.
Edit: Its a little later (I’m home today, feeling lousy and bored silly, BTW) – I’ve just figured out buttons! Scroll down! I added a bunch!
As in it’s all dyed. Seriously – there is nothing left to dye at chez Painted Sheep, except this:
That’s a 30 gallon bin that was full a couple of weeks ago. That lonely little bag of yarn is mine, mine, mine – its the Alpaca Handpaint base yarn that I’m going to dye for Mr. Greenjeans. It will wait. Everything else – done! I dyed up 4 more pounds of BFL roving yesterday and 23 skeins of sock yarn today. There’s 9 skeins left to wash in the morning – the rest just needs reskeining and labeling. This feels great! I may actually be done dyeing for the rest of the holiday season – meaning that my weekends are free to do holiday stuff! Woo hoo!
All this dyeing was done to restock my shop, but also in preparation for the Nutmeg Spinner’s Guild Meeting on Saturday, December 1. The Painted Sheep will have a table there again – one well stocked with yarnie and fibery goodness! Hope to see you there!
Big things should make me tense – important things like the economy, the war in Iraq, even my job (ok, that does make me tense). You get the point – the big stuff. Knitting is not supposed to make me tense, in fact its supposed to do the opposite. And yet, this had my jaw in clenched so badly it hurt this morning: 
This is the start of my nephew’s Christmas sweater, the Wonderful Wallaby. I consider myself a pretty decent knitter. I’m pretty much willing to try anything and I don’t get scared off by something challenging. This is not challenging – really a simple, seamless knit, with lots of mindless parts. Until I got to the “pouch” – the front pocket that you pick up, knit and then join back to the sweater body. I don’t know what it was about the directions for picking up the stitches to start the pocket – but I read them repeatedly over the last couple of days and could not figure them out. No part of my brain was able to puzzle through it and make sense of it. This morning, I made myself just do it – followed the directions one step at a time until I had the pocket picked up. Maybe it was the crochet hook involved, maybe I was over thinking it all, who knows – it was ugly. I was all knots – jaw clenched, neck tight. It worked out fine – the pocket is picked up perfectly, nice and seamless and I’m now cruising through it. The lesson, I think, is that sometimes I need to just blindly follow directions and not think about so much…
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